


Black and Blue OR: apologies to Roger Waters

by Zeryx



Series: So, a Hunter and an Angel go on a date... [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Angst, Awkwardness, Dean is Bad at Feelings, Dialogue Heavy, Kissing, M/M, Oral Sex, Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 14:03:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5668627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zeryx/pseuds/Zeryx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel's had enough of Netflix and takes matters into his own hands.</p><div class="center">
  <p>-------------------------------------------------------------</p>
</div><br/>"Dean, I wish to go on another date."<p>The hunter leans forward on the Impala's trunk with both hands and looks up through his eyelashes at the angel.<br/>"Yeah, okay. Well buddy, is there anything you haven't done in awhile?"</p><p>Cas's expression cools, to something dark and fathomless. He swallows.<br/>"The stars. It's been a very long time since I've had opportunity to observe the heavenly gyre."</p><p>Dean straightens up and claps Cas on the shoulder to hide the pang in his chest.<br/>"You, me, the Impala, Jose, and Pink Floyd." He grins at the angel. "It's a date."</p><p>Cas's expression is torn between wistful and grateful. Dean keeps walking, ignoring how it makes him want to shrivel up and die that the smallest scrap of kindness can so affect his friend, who is literally older than dirt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black and Blue OR: apologies to Roger Waters

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah... uh. When I saw how popular "Know I Believe and How" was, I decided to write a sequel to say thank-you when it reached 100 kudos and a 1000 hits. But...this is sad.  
> Enjoy?
> 
> Special thanks to my beta reader/constant reader Hit_the_books!

They've just finished up that whole mess with the ghoulpires and settled back into the bunker when Cas hits him with:  
"Dean, I wish to go on another date." 

The hunter in question grins good-naturedly at Castiel from where he's reloading supplies into the Impala's trunk.  
"Alright. I don't mind being your training wheels for a bit longer. What do you have in mind?" 

Cas's gaze is piercing as he circles around to the back of the car. "What is it you usually do?" 

"Hey, I'm the last person to ask, dude. Past few years, it's been beer and singles." Dean tosses a refilled flask of holy water in. 

Castiel stands next to Dean, mere inches away. He folds his arms, cocks his head to one side. "Singles... plural? Multiple women?" 

Dean laughs and reloads his colt. "Yeah, you can say that. But I meant a bunch of old dead white dudes." The rest of the box of ammo rattles when he throws it back into the trunk. 

Cas looks bewildered, eyebrows drawing together. 

Frustrated, Dean shuts the trunk and turns to face the seraph. "Presidents, Cas. _Dead presidents_." 

"Precedent for what?" 

Dean scrubs a hand down his face. "For the love of—dollar bills, Cas. Greenbacks. Strippers." 

"I refuse to be held liable for your failures at English, Dean." Cas rolls his eyes and is so every school teacher Dean's ever pissed off he can't help but laugh. 

The hunter leans forward on the trunk with both hands and looks up through his eyelashes at the angel.  
"Yeah, okay. Well buddy, is there anything you haven't done in awhile?" 

Cas's expression cools , to something dark and fathomless. He swallows. "The stars. It's been a very long time since I've had opportunity to observe the heavenly gyre." 

Dean straightens up and claps Cas on the shoulder to hide the pang in his chest. 

"You, me, the Impala, Jose, and Pink Floyd." He grins at the angel. "It's a date." 

Cas's expression is torn between wistful and grateful. Dean keeps walking, ignoring how it makes him want to shrivel up and die that the smallest scrap of kindness can so affect his friend, who is literally older than dirt.  
  


  
*** 

  


"Star gazing, huh? I'll say this for you: you're a cheaper date than a peeler bar." 

Cas ignores his words, but his hand reaches out and grabs Dean's. "My sense of time is not confined linearly, like your own largely is. When I look at the stars, it's like a time-lapsed photograph." Cas's expression is soft, eyes wide.   
"What I see are great wheeling arcs of light, describing the after shocks of the beginning of creation, like ripples from a pond... each creating its own waves in turn, forever carrying forward the light of His love." 

"By "He" you mean..." 

"Yes. God." Cas's gaze is intent, eyes nearly black, glowing in contrast to the rich velvet of new moon sky. 

"I'm just a dumb grunt Cas—" 

"That has _never_ been true—" 

"I don't get this stuff." Dean frowns. "Yeah, the light show is pretty rad, but you're asking me to swallow that you're constantly well, time traveling?" 

"It's more like time is a spectrum, and if I do not focus on a particular "colour" I miss shades of differentiation." 

"Like trying to hit a triple-twenty and hitting a regular twenty on the dart board, huh?" 

"Yes, that's it exactly." They lapse into silence. 

It's easy for Dean to forget how vast and ancient Castiel truly is. Thinking of that all being stripped away from Cas, who was like the genie in Aladdin (Infinite cosmic power, itty bitty living space) when he was human, makes Dean's gut roil. 

He feels an abrupt all consuming urge to claim Castiel as _Cas_ —slim, lithe lines—looking just human. To re-assert how he thinks of him usually, instead of as an ocean overflowing from an emptied vessel. 

His body is a chalice and Dean wishes to take sacrament. "Do you... ever miss flying?" 

"With every second this heart beats and in the spaces in-between." 

_I don't care what Cas says I am going to **end** meta-douche._

Cas's profile is monochromatic: he looks like a leading man from an old black and white movie; maybe one about war where the sailor gazes across the sea, in the direction of a home he'll never see again. 

Exquisitely finely tuned to what he's left behind, always seeking to face an unreachable horizon. 

"I'm sorry," slips out before Dean can swallow it back. 

Cas's eyes are liquid quick silver. Dean squeezes his hand and looks away. 

"I've got my home right here." He pats the Impala, a solid thump that rocks the car slightly on its wheels. "And you and Sam." It's way more than he wants to admit, but God, anything at all to get away from this suffocating feeling of hopeless inadequacy. 

"Someday you both will die. Sooner is more probable." Cas slides his hand up the back of Dean's, over his arm, up past his neck, to cup his jaw. 

Dean meets his gaze and the intensity is searing, here under the shroud of stars and the desolation of complete isolation: here, far from any town or even tree. "You and Sam will go where none may follow,and it crushes me more than being bound to this earth." 

"Cas, _what the hell_. What isn't Sammy telling me?" 

The look Cas throws him is laced with pity and resignation. He shakes his head. "It's too awful, Dean." 

Dean squares his jaw and grabs Cas by the lapels, and _Christ, this is not why he saw himself doing that this evening_. 

"Freaking tell me." 

Cas hunches his shoulders further, puts one hand over Dean's. "The reapers, every last one of them, are upset with you over killing Death. 

"Instead of Heaven, you will be thrown into the void. The primordial darkness where nothing truly existed, and nothing exists still. You will be unmade, scattered to the spaces between neurons, between stars. Destroyed as if you never had a soul." 

"Geez, don't sugar-coat it, pal." 

Dean can't take it in, it took him a long time to believe Heaven existed, in angels, in God. 

Now when he dies, it'll be like he originally thought: nothing at all waiting for him. No more "him." 

Dean lets go of Cas, sticks his hands in his overcoat pockets. "'S'ironic." 

From the corner of his eye, Cas quirks his head. 

"I was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, Cas. Now after saving the world from an Archangel showdown, killing Death and releasing the Darkness, I'm back to square one." 

There was a time the idea of the loss of self made Dean quail in existential horror. But that was a long time ago, before Hell and demon-hood. Now, the idea starts to have appeal; a warm blanket blocking out noise and cold numbness until everything just—vanishes. Dean chuckles. "I'm a terrible date. We should stick to pretend." 

Cas has a look of intense concentration on his face, and Dean idly wonders where his friend is aiming to land now. 

After a slow blink, Cas is heading for the backseat. Dean surreptitiously checks out Cas's ass as he crawls into the car. Seconds later, he emerges with the cooler and sets it on the ground. When Cas straightens up, a bottle of Jose Cuervo is in his hand. 

The bottle is cold and wet; Dean wipes the bottle down with his sleeve. 

Cas watches him curiously, lips slightly parted, like he was about to say something but forgot. He licks his lips, and Dean screws off the lid with a sharp snap like breaking the neck of a pigeon. 

"Let's get this party started," Dean mutters, passing the bottle off. He kicks off the door, leans in, twists the key a quarter inch and a moment later "Dark Side of the Moon" starts playing. 

The familiar, dreamy guitar riffs loosen some of the tension in his shoulders, and as he straightens back up he notes Cas is a third of a way through the 26er. 

"Hey!" He snatches the bottle back and glares reproachfully. "We really gotta work on you and this whole sipping thing." 

"I wish to be intoxicated; speed will accomplish that." 

"Ya gotta slow down and savour the little things, Cas." Dean gestures at the sky. "This? This is overwhelmingly freaking huge. But this?" He motions between the bottle, Cas, and himself. "This I can grok. All that's left is the little things, you know? Gotta squeeze 'em for what you can." __

_Run, Rabbit run... Dig that hole, forget the sun..._

Cas is silent, hands still in his coat pockets, eyes on the stars. Dean represses the urge to seek the warm solidity of flesh under his mouth, to get his hands under all those layers. _How do I keep him "here here"?_

Cas is carved of marble in the starlight. Stark baroque only betrayed by the flutter of his coat in the breeze and the waving of his hair. 

Dean takes a swig of tequila and carefully doesn't think. 

_Balanced on the biggest wave, you race towards an early grave..._

He holds the amber liquid in his mouth and slowly puts his hands on Cas's chest. The angel looks down then; Dean holds his gaze, seeing the remote otherness slide away as he seals their mouths together. 

Inhaling noisily through his nose, his eyes slide shut as Dean parts his lips, pushing a trickle of liquid in Cas's mouth with a tentative slide of tongue. 

Cas catches on quickly, tongue sliding against Dean's, teasing the liquid out with the barest hint of suction. 

When their mouths part, Dean gasps for air, dazed as Cas runs his fingers along the backs of his hands and knuckles. They lean together, foreheads touching. 

"I understand," Cas murmurs. 

"Yeah?" Dean pulls back to look at him, 

"Yes. We must take what we can, while we can." 

Cas cups Dean's jaw. "For you, there is a singular now. Which you are choosing to spend with me." His eyes go heavy-lidded, voice thick. "Courting me." 

_So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking..._

"Cas—" 

"Showing me how to find another, once you've gone? But there's only ever be—" Dean cuts him off with a kiss born of feverish desperation, chasing the burn of Tequila out of his friend's mouth. 

"Nothing about us makes sense. Let's rip up the damn script."  
_Just like we always have._ It's not like Dean's never thought about Cas out-living him. Kinda hard not to after that scene in the library; the smell of gasoline poisoning the air, the corpse of an innocent kid, and Cas, saying he'll still be there, long after everyone else is gone. 

Battered and bloodied by the hands skating over his body now. Dean feels a hot flush of shame, but it's not enough to make him stop. 

Like when they went to Salina, Dean wants to do something for Cas. That it's uh, also _to_ him is secondary. Dean is good at this, he can do this, use his hands and mouth to beat back the swell of panic surging in his chest at the idea of Cas alone, again, not for just a few months like in Idaho, but for good. 

_Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines._

No Dean, no Sam, no Balthazar, no Anna, no Uriel, no Gabriel, none of the angels that had been felled. 

_No Hannah_. Hannah who'd been so much like the factory reset of Cas it'd been downright unsettling. 

Hannah, who had demanded Dean's life. Which Cas had refused to take. 

At the cost of his whole family. 

_Again._

Cas bites down gently on Dean's bottom lip and the hunter comes back to the present with a gasp. 

"I saw you... drift. You were unmoored in time. Where did you go?" 

_Far away across the field._

"No place, Cas. Just thinking of you." 

_The tolling of the iron bell_. 

Cas grins, pleased, and hums. "I like it when you think of me. I enjoy the tendril of your mind, your soul, reaching out, Brushing my grace." 

Blushing a little, Dean mutters, "Shut up, Cas." And drowns further words in a heated press of lips. 

_Brings the faithful to their knees._

Dean sinks down, kneeling on the hard, bare earth and undoes Cas's zipper. Castiel's fingers twine in his hair. He whispers praises in soft indistinguishable murmurs as they compete with the jangling chords of "Money". 

Some minutes later:  
_Who knows which is which, and who is who?_

The impala's backseat cradles them both, an ouroboros of heated skin as they slide wet and hard between each-other's lips, tongues relentless as Castiel mimics Dean's increasingly frantic ministrations. 

After, skin flushed and damp, hair tousled and snarled, Dean whispers into the side of Cas's neck. "It's cold, Cas." Cold, empty and dark, save the pinpricks of stars in the black swath of night sky. 

_All that is now_

 _All that is gone_

 _

All that's to come

_

The Milky way is present everywhere, visible but impossibly distant, impossibly _vast_. A beautiful river washing over two lost souls clinging hopelessly to each-other as the endless tide of time threatens to separate and drown them both. 

The stereo chimes in with: _"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark."_

Dean shivers. "Let's go home." 

The tape ends and Dean's thoughts unspool into the silence. 

_We could've stayed together. Demons live forever. I mean, not exactly me, but—Cas wouldn't be alone._  
The story of Dean's frigging life, salvation is damnation. A flash of Cas's bloody face and unresisting body makes Dean feel like he's going to puke. 

_Cas would probably want that about as little as I'd want him to be human._

He refuses to think of the warehouse, how Cas beat him in turn when he was under the influence of the attack dog spell. 

He thinks instead, of how he'd cradled Castiel's face afterward in both hands, terrified the angel wasn't going to come back to him this time. 

That this time, his friend was going to stay cold and dead on the floor—never again to look up at him with a goofy grin or eyes too serious, face too close, completely inappropriate for whatever situation they were in. 

_But Cas had woken up_. He'd smiled, even, despite what must've been incredible pain. Dean had decided then, that for all the times Cas had healed him—Hell, him and Sam both, God only knows how much damage all those concussions they'd racked up over the years would've done otherwise—he was going to do his level best to take care of Cas. Whatever that meant. 

Cas pecks Dean on the temple. "Well?" 

"Oh yeah, sorry." Dean forces a smile that fails to reach his eyes. "Just zoned out. You really took it out of me, tiger." 

Shooting Dean a look rife with disappointment, Cas turns away and starts pulling his clothes back on. 

Dean stares for a moment at the deft movements, struck by the fact of those same fingers having been on and inside of him minutes ago. 

Cheeks burning, he gives his head a little shake and redresses himself. 

The drive back is silent, save the wind rattling the windows and Dean's breathing. The first street-lamp's glow washes over Dean like a wave of relief. An island of light in the cold eternally distant universe. 

_Could've been out there somewhere. Death would've taken me. Someplace I can't imagine._

 _The only "darkness" I'd have ever known._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry to everyone who came here expecting fluff because of the previous story in this series. I swear when I started this I wasn't expecting things to go in this direction.  
> Blame the musing on metaphysics on Expatgirl and BurningTea and their influence.


End file.
